Affair in Araby eBook

“All right,” said Jeremy, “I’ll
give him the gold mine. Let him erect a modern
plant and he’ll have millions!”

“Uh-huh! Keep the mine secret. Let
him go to London and arrange about Mespot. Just
at present High Finance could find a hundred ways of
disputing his title to the mine, but once he’s
king with the Arabs all rooting for him things’ll
be different. He’ll treat you right when
that time comes, don’t worry.”

“Worry? Me?” said Jeremy.
“All that worries me is having to see this business
through before we can make a wake for Sydney.
I’m homesick. But never mind. All
right, you fellers, I’ll make one to give this
Feisul boy a hoist!”

CHAPTER II

“Atcha, Jimgrim sahib! Atcha!”

That conversation and Jeremy’s conversion to
the big idea took place on the way across the desert
to Jerusalem—­a journey that took us a week
on camel-back—­a rowdy, hot journey with
the stifling simoom blowing grit into our followers’
throats, who sang and argued alternately nevertheless.
For, besides our old Ali Baba and his sixteen sons
and grandsons, there were Jeremy’s ten pickups
from Arabia’s byways, whom he couldn’t
leave behind because they knew the secret of his gold-mine.

Grim’s authority is always at its height on
the outbound trail, for then everybody knows that
success, and even safety, depends on his swift thinking;
on the way home afterward reaction sets in sometimes,
because Arabs are made light-headed by success, and
it isn’t a simple matter to discipline free
men when you have no obvious hold over them.

But that was where Jeremy came in. Jeremy could
do tricks, and the Arabs were like children when he
performed for them. They would be good if he
would make one live chicken into two live ones by pulling
it apart. They would pitch the tents without
fighting if he would swallow a dozen eggs and produce
them presently from under a camel’s tail.
If he would turn on his ventriloquism and make a
camel say its prayers, they were willing to forgive—­for
the moment anyhow—­even their nearest enemies.

So we became a sort of travelling sideshow, with Jeremy
ballyhooing for himself in an amazing flow of colloquial
Arabic, and hardly ever repeating the same trick.

All of which was very good for our crowd and convenient
at the moment, but hardly so good for Jeremy’s
equilibrium. He is one of those handsome, perpetually
youthful fellows, whose heads have been a wee mite
turned by the sunshine of the world’s warm smile.
I don’t mean by that that he isn’t a tophole
man, or a thorough-going friend with guts and gumption,
who would chance his neck for anyone he likes without
a second’s hesitation, for he’s every
bit of that. He has horse sense, too, and isn’t
fooled by the sort of flattery that women lavish on
men who have laughing eyes and a little dark moustache.

But he hasn’t been yet in a predicament that
he couldn’t laugh or fight his way out of;
he has never yet found a job that he cared to stick
at for more than a year or two, and seldom one that
could hold him for six months.